Burkett Says He Did Not 'Totally Mislead' CBS

(CNSNews.com) - The same day that CBS News and veteran anchor Dan Rather issued an apology for the controversy over airing faulty documents that criticized President Bush's National Guard service, a source at the center of the issue insisted he did not "totally mislead" the network.

Rather and the network said in a statement earlier that former Texas National Guard official Bill Burkett had acknowledged that he provided the documents and "deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."

During his newscast Monday evening, Rather said Burkett "initially told CBS News he got the documents from a fellow guardsmen, but when we interviewed Burkett this past weekend, he changed his story and told us he got the documents from a different source, one we cannot verify."

In a televised interview, Burkett told Rather, "I didn't totally mislead you. I did mislead you on the one individual. Your staff pressured me to a point to reveal that source."

Rather told Burkett, "We were trying to get the chain of possession...and it's true, we pressured you because it was a very important point for us."

"And I simply threw out a name that was basically, it was, I guess to get a little pressure off [me] for a moment," Burkett admitted.